Displaced responsibility

German officers pose with the skulls of Armenians murdered in Hakim Khane (now Hekimhan in Turkey) in 1915. The photo was taken in November 1918

More than half of the 1.5 to two million Armenians and around 200,000 Assyrian Christians in the Ottoman Empire fell victim to genocide during the First World War. In April 1915, the ruling Young Turks had the Armenian ruling classes as well as scholars and clergy arrested, tortured and later murdered using carefully prepared lists. They then forced the Armenian population on death marches into the Syrian desert and Mesopotamia. Anyone who survived this was far from being saved, because the region was completely under the impression of the brutalization of the war: the defenseless people became victims of looting, slavery, rape and murder.

Responsible for this were not only politicians, military officers and nationalist ideologues, but also "ordinary" Turks, Kurds, Syrians and other Arabs who vented violence on the persecuted in an atmosphere of unleashed violence or benefited from their exclusion from Ottoman society or their murder in one form or another. Only a few showed their best side in their resistance or the urge to help the weakest, while an almost unbelievable mass of people were guilty of their direct neighbors and fellow citizens. Mets Yerern, the “great crime,” is what the Armenians call what was done to them back then.

Germans were not only guilty of crimes against the Herero and Nama peoples in the colonial war and against European Jews in the Shoah - they were also involved in the genocide of the Young Turks, which was suppressed in this country.

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